In recent time, there has been an explosion in the use of mobile phone applications on smartphones to facilitate a specific consumer demand. In some ways, a smartphone has rapidly become a mobile device with a powerful processing capability. The convenience of having a relatively small portable device that is light weight and easily carried by people of all ages, provides a platform in which thousands of mobile applications are created and made available for public consumption.
As the world becomes more interconnected, people are traveling more frequently locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. In entering and exiting a metered facility, such as a parking structure or other controlled-exit facilities, the processes and methods have been traditionally manually-intensive driven. In a conventional scenario, a consumer entering a parking structure at a shopping mall picks up a paper ticket before entering the parking structure. Before exiting the parking structure, the user would normally pay the necessary parking fee by walking to the service window of such parking establishment and handling the ticket to the cashier, who in turn would take the payment and manually code the ticket to reflect a verification of payment. Alternatively, there might be a receiving machine in the facility, in which the user can insert the parking ticket and pay via the machine with cash or credit card. After receiving a parking ticket that has been coded as paid, the user would normally insert the ticket at the exit gate to exit the parking structure. This method of entering and exiting a parking structure is inconvenient and inefficient.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have a smartphone or other mobile device that offers a software application, which better facilitates the use of such parking structures or controlled-exit establishments.